April 28, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Very interesting comment from Dr.
Very interesting comment from Dr. Weevil:
Is the difference between controlled and uncontrolled guns like the difference between driving and flying? It is notorious that driving is far more dangerous than flying, but flying seems more dangerous because plane crashes, though rare, typically kill dozens or hundreds of people at once, while car crashes kill tens of thousands per year in the U.S. alone, but only one or two or five or six at a time.Similarly, it seems to me pretty well established now that countries with strict gun control will, all other things being equal, lose more lives to gun crime, but mostly only one or two at a time, so that they may seem safer, even if they are not. At the same time, countries with widespread legal gun ownership, such as the U.S., Switzerland, and Israel, will see fewer citizens murdered overall, but it may well be that more of them will be in large-scale massacres, so that these countries will continue to seem more dangerous, while actually being safer.
There's a caveat: gun crime is lower in Europe. But in Europe, it's rising, even as laws get stricter; in America it's falling, even as they move towards a "Shall-issue" model (anyone not known to be a felon or seriously nuts is entitled to a concealed carry license). Switzerland has almost no gun crime even though every household is required to have a military rifle; Japan has almost no gun crime, and very strict gun laws (though with Japan it should be noted that Japan has almost no crime, partly because their police system is extremely illiberal, partly because of the way the society is set up, and partly because a lot of their crime is of the organized variety that integrates itself with the government and thus avoids prosecution).
Societies have a base rate of crime that is affected by a number of factors. The question is, holding everything else constant, does gun control raise or lower that rate?
The evidence that we seem to be getting, from looking at the change in the rate of violent crime following changes in gun laws, seems to be that gun control raises the rate. Gun control arguments make a logical progression from a false premise. They start with an imaginary world in which there are no guns. Yes, in that world, there would probably be fewer homicides. (There would probably not be fewer suicides -- the data's awfully bad) It's hard to kill someone with a knife or some such.
So gun control advocates imagine a straight line trend: more guns, more crime. If we imagine it as a graph, it would be a straight, upward sloping line.
This is based on a logical fallacy, which is that the population of those who would own guns if they were rare is a representative sample of the population who would own guns if they were plentiful. In other words, that if there are 1 million gun owners in the US, this group will be composed of the same percentages of different types of people as if there were 100 million gun owners. So that if there is a percentage of gun crime in the larger group, say one per thousand, the same percentage of crime will be found in the smaller group. Gun control thus cuts the number of crimes by whatever factor it by which it cuts the number of guns. This produces that straight line we graphed. However, this is demonstrably untrue.
There are three ways, in America, that we can imagine that guns would become rare: first, that they became very expensive for some reason; second, that they became illegal; and third, that they became extremely stigmatised.
In that case, assuming that the number of guns in the country will still be non-zero (and if you think it wouldn't, go take a look at Great Britain, with its near-total ban and relatively non-porous borders), who will own guns if they are expensive, illegal, or stigmatized? The answer in all three cases is the same: criminals. Criminals have a very high value for guns, because of their extreme usefulness in committing crimes. They have a demonstrated willingness to break the law. And they are (clearly) relatively immune to the kind of middle-class social stigma that would make guns unpopular.
Thus, there would be a very high initial rate of crime. However, as price, illegality, or stigma decreased, the population would change. Mixed in with the criminals would be non-criminals. So we would actually expect to see a curve that looks more like this:
But that's not the entire story either, because guns have both a crime-increasing and crime-decreasing effect. The possibility that their victims might be armed demonstrably has some effect on the propensity of criminals to commit violent crime (those who argue it doesn't are simply being stupid. If you were a criminal, would you respond to the probability that your victims might be armed? Of course you would. Criminals may not be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, but they aren't immune to threat. For example, they avoid the police. The extent of the deterrance is a different question. But there is a deterrant effect.). This countervailing effect would put downward pressure on the curve.
Imagine the scenario. The criminals arm themselves early in the process, resulting in a crime spree. But as guns become more widely owned, the number of law-abiding citizens who have guns is increasing, while the number of criminals who have them is remaining fairly stable. As the curve moves to the right (increasing numbers of guns in the population), there is downward effect on the curve from the law-abiding citizens, whose guns criminals fear, while the upward effect is flat. So the curve starts moving downwards again. In other words, the curve will peak near the point where the majority of criminals who want guns have them, and the majority of law-abiding citizens do not. It will therefore look more like this:
So the question of whether gun control will decrease gun deaths relies on where we are in the curve: to the left of the peak, or to the right of it? If we're to the left, making guns harder to get will decrease homicides and other violent crime. If we're to the right, we'll largely take guns out of the hands of the law-abiding, and gun deaths will go up.
Evidence is that we're to the right of that curve maxima. Personally I doubt we could even get to the left. Europeans are getting their guns from the war-zones in the Balkans, despite tight gun control and border controls. The war on drugs has proved pretty conclusively that even when the governments are co-operating it's hard to keep out contraband; we'd have to take over Latin America to keep them from shipping us guns, and then there's Asia. . . and even if we magically managed to shut down every arms shipment, there's still our military depots, and the fact that a serviceable weapon can be manufactured from commonly available materials for a couple hundred bucks. Given the high value that a gun offers to criminals, it's hard to imagine how we could get to a point where they don't get their hands on them.
But don't trust the theory; check out John Lott's book, More Guns, Less Crime
and see for yourself whether the empirical data backs it up. If you savvy statistics, it's a good read. If you don't -- well, look at the headlines. Gun control isn't stopping criminals from getting guns in Europe, or in my hometown -- what about yours?